Friday, August 31, 2012

Happy Friday! It's my last Friday of freedom before I start my second job teaching piano lessons for the fall semester. I love my work, but I've loved the little break I get during the summer too! I've loved being home with the girls after school this week, helping with homework, making cookies, and doing puzzles. This is the life!

This week I loved the sketch at the Mojo Monday blog, so I decided to play along. Here's the sketch:

And here's my take on the sketch:

I chose the round option (obviously) with some of my favorite SU retired DSP from last fall. I stamped my main image with the beautiful French Foliage set from SU and added some baker's twine and hand-dyed seam binding from Kristii Lockart. Thanks, Kristii!

I hope you all have a wonderful Friday. It's pizza and movie night at our house! Yay!

Thursday, August 30, 2012

It's already dark as I sit here at 8:30-ish in the evening. I feel a little sad about summer ending so soon and my sweet little girls going back to school. Cooler weather sounds really lovely right now, since it was very hot today and my house is absolutely sweltering! It will be a little too quiet around here really soon though! I've had lots of fun with my Copics over the last few months, and I did these fall pumpkins long ago and decided they needed to find a home on a card. I don't have many shades of orange, so they're a bit bright, but I thought they were sort of cheerful.

I'm certainly not a Copic expert, but I have had a lot of fun experimenting with my few colors. I hope all is well wherever you find yourself tonight! Happy fall, my friends!

Monday, August 27, 2012

My recent trip to the family farm got me in the spirit for a fun mini album project full of country images. For this mini I used a bunch of 6x9 envelopes I found at the thrifty (score!) and the Mabel Stella and Rose paper collection. I LOVE the country feel of these beautiful papers which are reminiscent of an old farmhouse, and the texture of this paper is delicious. Pure joy! I used a card stock binding for this album and chipboard covers. I'd never bound my own book with chipboard, and it was a little more challenging than it looked on the tutorial by Following the Paper Trail. I'm sure practice makes perfect, so it will get easier in the future. I decorated the cover with images from my Country Life Cricut cartridge. The little pig and chicken are my fave, so they had to introduce the album!

Here are a selection of some of the pages in the album. This album has twelve inside pages (with pull-out pockets for each envelope) and holds 35 photos in various sizes.

I had so much fun with this little album. I can't wait to stock it with photos! Have a wonderful week, my friends!

Sunday, August 19, 2012

One of my favorite ways to make my stash go further is to use my stamps to create my own patterned paper. For this card, I used the feather image from my SU Established Elegance stamp set to create a repeated pattern on a plain piece of Daffodil Delight card stock. A stamp positioning tool is definitely your best friend on a project like this!

For the main image on this project, I stamped the typewriter onto a sticky note and cut it out, then positioned the mask on my ivory card stock before stamping the alphabet. Then I removed the mask and stamped the typewriter in the masked area.

I used a similar process for the card below using a damask background stamped in Pear Pizzazz. This process allows you to create the perfect paper using an inexpensive neutral card base.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Hi, friends! I've really been on a roll with the mini albums lately, and I finished another paper bag mini I'd like to share. This album uses the 2012 Halloween release from K and Company, along with a few leftover goodies from my Hocus Pocus album. This mini uses only three paper bags, chipboard covers and a card stock binding covered in painted canvas. I love the little labels and 3-D stickers in this collection. So gooky-fun!

I used the fun crow image from the paper pack to decorate the cover, along with some grungeboard, some altered flashing tape, an inked flower and some Pink Paislee glitter letters.

Here are a few of my favorite pages:

This page has a pocket and a wallet flip book that holds six photos.

I stamped a Tim Holtz image on this Kraft tag with marker, and it turned out so streaky and horror movie-ish. Fun!! The photo wallet in the pocket holds three more photos as well as the spider web photo mat for two additional spaces.

This flip book holds four 4x6 photos.

Another wallet flip book with six additional photo spaces. This little album holds sooo many photos, plus all the pull-out tags on the ends that fit inside the paper bags!

The back cover with another big crow, a rub-on left over from the Hocus Pocus line and some altered flashing tape.

This fun little album took no time at all, and I can't wait to give this one away to someone special. I hope they'll love it. Have a wonderful week, my friends!

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Last fall I purchased the adorable Hocus Pocus line by Pink Paislee from Scrapbook Steals, and I've been saving it for the perfect project. Another tutorial by the incomparable and generous Susie at Creative Cafe inspired me to try this fun paper bag mini album. I'd like to share some highlights, and I hope it inspires you to visit Creative Cafe and give one of Susie's wonderful projects a try! I started with the largest size black paper bags from Michael's and used Susie's card stock binding method to build my pages. The chipboard cover uses some Tim Holtz grungeboard and a keyhole and some decorative canvas and alpha stickers from the paper collection. I used black acrylic paint to distress the edges of my chipboard and a few of my inside pages.

The Hocus Pocus line came with a set of super cool transparencies, so I used them to create pockets on my inside covers. I distressed the tag with coffee and let it dry overnight and used some glitter stickers from the collection. I made the paper clip with punches and my hot glue gun. Each pocket holds a whole passel of tags and photo mats with spells written by my daughters. We had so much fun thinking of "wicked" ingredients!

This page uses a couple of K & Company stickers and another decorative paper clip.

These potion stickers from K & Company have beads inside, along with things like brains and lizards and all kinds of gross goodies!

This page has a photo wallet on the left and a photo flip mat on the right that holds six 4x6 photos. I love the colors in this paper line! The skeleton and spooky sentiment are rub-ons from the paper collection.

Another fun transparency pocket cover and some more tags and spells ...

All of the envelopes have pull tags inside large enough to hold more 4x6 photos, each with a fun spell or potion on the back side. We even used some real spells from a set of kind of popular books about wizards. What's the name of that series again?

I can't wait to add our fun Halloween photos to this book, and since the girls had such a hand in writing the spells and potions, the book itself made some great memories. Let the wand-waving begin!

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Hi, friends! I'm back with another Halloween project to share, this time inspired by the Once Upon a Sketch Challenge for August on the theme "Season." I chose autumn for my season and some funny photos of my brother from a Halloween party we had a while back. Asa radiates fun, so I wanted to celebrate his awesome sense of humor in this layout. Here's the sketch:

And here's my take on it:

I had lots of fun with this one! It uses the Hocus Pocus Line from Pink Paislee and some K&Co scraps from my stash. I used the Mini Monsters Cricut cartridge to create the fences, title, and gravestones along with some little accessories from the paper collection. The transparency sheets in this collection were a blast, and they've gotten a lot of mileage in my projects already.

I hope you'll play along with Once Upon a Sketch as well! Their blog always has oodles of inspiration. Thanks for stopping by, my friends!

This week I decided to play along with the Mojo Monday Sketch Challenge, but in true Jessica form, I'm just squeaking in under the deadline to post on Saturday. I don't know why, but I've been in Halloween land for a month, and I've created tons of Halloween projects I'll be posting soon. I'm not sure why the bug hit me, but I'm going with it I guess!

Here's this week's Mojo Monday sketch:

And here's my take on it:

For this project, I used the K&Company Halloween stack (which is super cute this year) along with my SU Dark and Dreary and Spooky Bingo Bits Stamp Sets, Spellbinders Dies, and Basic Gray Cardstock. I had so much fun playing along with this challenge. Thank you to the Mojo Monday ladies for the inspiration!

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Hi, everyone! Today I want to share a super fun project I just finished! It's a tiny (and I mean tiny) little paper bag mini album using My Mind's Eye Lost and Found Sunshine paper pack. This little guy measures 4 1/2 x 2 1/2 with a card stock binding and chipboard cover. I based this album on a technique I learned from Susie at Creative Cafe, the absolute queen of creative and fun mini albums. If you're a mini album lover, check out her blog and Youtube channel as she generously shares amazing tutorials all the time. Thank you, Susie!

I used the smallest size kraft paper bags from Michael's as the base for this album. Although it's tiny, this album has a lot of space with room for 17 wallet size photos and a number of journaling tags. Let the fun begin!

The cover is embellished with paper from the collection, some Recollections gems, crochet trim, and some embossed, painted and sanded metal flashing tape. I used black rose trim to cover my binding and a ribbon with velcro attached as a closure.

This page has a pull-out mini tag, a pocket, and a flip book that holds three photos. Each page has a pull-out tag inside the envelope for even more photos and journaling.

This page is decorated with an epoxy sticker, some more Recollections gems, and some Prima flowers.

This little tag has a sewing theme to go with the vintage sewing machine. My favorite!

Another photo mat, pocket, and mini journaling tag ...

This page has another flip book that holds two photos with a pocket and tag on the other side.

The back is decorated with more paper from the collection and more strips of flashing tape.

This little album started a whole rash of inspiration, so I'll be sharing more little albums soon! What a fun gift for a special someone on a special day! I can't wait to gift this one!

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Hi, friends! I'm back today to share a few projects I've been working on lately. June's kit from My Creative Scrapbook featured the summery line Sun Kiss by Prima. I tend to avoid all things sunflower (I'm not sure why other than to say they're just not "me"), but I really enjoyed creating some layouts with this kit. I tried to focus less on the pervasive sunflower theme and more on the fun summery colors the kit features.

My first layout uses some of the super cute chipboard pieces and fun blues, yellows, and oranges. This sunny photo of my daughter captures her wonderful gap-toothed stage so sweetly. Even though I'm sure we'll have to straighten her teeth one day, I want to remember her sweet little girl smile forever.

The sketch comes from the June issue of Scrapbook 365, a UK-based publication that features some absolutely GORGEOUS layouts. If you've never seen this mag, you can check out their site here. It's absolutely my favorite scrapbooking magazine!

I also wanted to do a clean and simple layout (gasp, I know!) featuring my daughter's first pair of glasses. It was a challenge for me not to embellish this layout to pieces, but I resisted and used a pair of die cut glasses with some button eyes and my title as a focal point.

We've been enjoying our summer to the fullest, and I hope you have been too! See you soon, my friends!